Lyons: Investigation of overzealous marshal may be reaching end

Wednesday

Jan 8, 2014 at 9:21 PM

Deputy marshal came under scrutiny over tactics while seeking sex offender

Tom LYons

After I wrote last year about a deputy federal marshal's zealous missteps in Sarasota, while looking in all the wrong places for a man wanted on a sex offense charge, the agent became the subject of an internal investigation.

There are hints now that it might be over.

You might recall that the deputy marshal, Matt Wiggins, barged through a Sarasota nurse's door on a July evening while armed and body-armored, spouting curses and threats after making demands that the woman open her door.

The invasion was based on the incorrect, instantly formed guess that she must have a wanted man in her apartment.

The nurse, Louise Goldsberry, had never even heard of the wanted man, who was thought to be in the neighborhood. The only reason Wiggins suspected he was in Goldsberry's apartment: When one of his own well-armed, non-uniformed men peered and pointed his weapon into Goldsberry's kitchen window, Goldsberry, who was washing dishes, screamed and ducked in a panic.

She grabbed her small handgun from her bedroom and huddled in her hallway thinking home invaders were outside, and she said she couldn't believe real cops would curse at her and demand to be let in as Wiggins did.

After she was finally convinced, and handcuffed for a while, Wiggins left and later told me that Goldsberry should feel fortunate he had not shot her or taken her to jail.

It was his second foul up that day. Earlier, his man-hunting task force had tackled a mall cookie shop employee from behind, without warning, thinking he looked like their man.

I later heard from a couple who said that, a few weeks before the incidents with Goldsberry and the cookie shop employee, Wiggins and his team had awakened them, yanked them outside their front door and put them on the ground at gunpoint where they were loudly taunted and called liars as neighbors gawked.

It was another oops. One of Wiggins' supervisors later acknowledged that the couple was not harboring any fugitive and apparently did not know the man the task force unit was seeking.

U.S. Marshal William Berger, who runs the Tampa office where Wiggins has been based, told me on Tuesday that he does not know what the internal investigation's results may be, or if it is done.

But Wiggins, he said, is still removed from his former position in charge of the fugitive task force, and any role with that unit, pending the outcome.

It has now been more than five months.

“I haven't been told anything,” Berger said.

But there are hints the investigation is being wrapped up. When an agent with the Department of Justice's Inspector General's office interviewed Goldsberry during the summer about her encounter with Wiggins, she was more than willing to cooperate but wanted an attorney's advice first. A spokesman for Goldsberry's lawyer, Andrea Mogensen, said the law office was contacted this week by a representative from the U.S. Marshal Service. The agency wants Goldsberry's signature on a release form to allow the Department of Justice to send the lawyer an unredacted copy of the investigation's findings.

Berger said if the internal investigation is over, and if any wrongdoing was found and potential disciplinary action is to be considered, that won't be his call.

The decision will be made at U.S. Marshal service headquarters in Washington D.C.

Whenever it happens, the result will be a message to any federal agents who work in Wiggins' style.

I can only hope that message will make it clear that going after suspects never empowers them to invade, assault, abuse or terrorize people based on flimsy guesses and unwarranted assumptions.